Eberhard Grün (born 30 March 1942, in Germany) is a German planetary scientist who specialized in cosmic dust research.
During this period, he spent six months as a visiting scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center focusing on data analysis of cosmic dust experiments, and six months as a visiting scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, doing research on hypervelocity impact phenomena.
In 2004 Eberhard Grün was a visiting scientist ("Erskine Visitor") at the Physics and Astronomy department of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand where he gave several lectures on the Solar System, orbital dynamics, and the cosmos.
[2] In 2007 he became a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) of the University of Colorado in Boulder (USA).
During his scientific career the main fields of his work were: From 1981 until his retirement in 2007, he guided over 100 undergraduate and 50 graduate students towards their PhD-degrees.
Eberhard Grün was the Principal Investigator (PI) of dust instruments on many space missions such as the Helios (1974), Galileo (1989), Ulysses (1990), and Cassini–Huygens (1997).
The DPS mentions: "His career is an unbroken record of high quality work that has provided us with a good fraction of what we understand about the smallest bodies in the solar system".
[26] In 2003 he received the David Robert Bates Medal from the European Geosciences Union (EGU) for his "Innovative experimental and wideranging scientific contributions to dust research throughout the heliosphere".
[28] Eberhard Grün received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in April 2011 for his leading role in dust science for over 30 years.